The Last of Us Delivers A Zombie Video Game with Heart

Joel, your player character in Naughty Dog and Sony 's new video game The Last of Us, says this often as you make your way through the desolate towns and overgrown cities of a decaying United States. Each time he says it, he sounds exhausted and grimly accepting of his own indeterminate fate. You’re wandering through the end of the world, after all, and there’s no telling when you might become the next victim of infection or a hungry band of marauders. What’s more, you’re traveling with a 14-year-old girl named Ellie who seems as defenseless as she is bored with your fatherly dictums to keep her out of harm’s way.

“Let’s see where this goes” is one of the few lines I remember hearing enough in The Last of Us that it almost became repetitive. It’s a grim sigh from a broken and nearly defeated man, but it also serves as a refrain to show what makes The Last of Us such a special game.

There’s a lot of The Last of Us that sounds stale and unimaginative at face value. It’s a story-driven third-person shooter and stealth game set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. You have to fight your way through or sneak around hordes of “the infected,” a group of sad souls that resemble pale and blistering cauliflower, and “Mad Max”-style raiders. There is vague talk of finding the key to humanity’s salvation, but more often you’re dealing with the bitter facts of life in a state of nature. You will scrounge for supplies in hollowed-out buildings and be confronted with inhuman choices about who gets to live or die. You will cringe at incredible acts of violence you didn’t think you were capable of, but still relish the satisfy thud of splitting another man’s head open with a lead pipe.

As Joel, you will begin the game wary and unwelcome to Ellie’s presence by your side. She will tease and prod you in turn. Then, like countless survivor stories, you will grow to love one another in a fierce and selfish way.

It’s all been done before in movies, novels, and video games. But not like this.

“Let’s see where this goes,” Joel says as he struggles to push a heavy piece of furniture to clear the way into a dank and foreboding tunnel. We’ve all been down that tunnel before in “28 Days Later,” in “The Road”—hell, even in the “Call of Duty” zombies mode. In spite of all that, The Last of Us still feels like something new.

Naughty Dog’s developers have repeatedly emphasized that Joel and Ellie aren’t meant to be the hardened super-soldiers seen in so many video games. They, like their profoundly human opponents (well, maybe not the cauliflower people), are still eager enough to survive and sensible enough to realize not everyone is going to.

The game bears an obvious homage to Cormac McCarthy’s stunning novel “The Road”—an inspiration that Naughty Dog often wears on its sleeve. But The Last of Us smartly avoids any of the more reflective and poetic moments McCarthy brought to his work. Joel does not wrestle with God in this game; he wrestles with zombies. Survival does not mean “carrying the fire,” but making it from one end of a room to the other in one piece.

This efficient pragmatism keeps the Last of Us from devolving into the self-aware irony and often-tiresome hand wringing of a shooter like BioShock Infinite or Far Cry 3. At a purely mechanical level, it strips the game down to its bare essentials. The thin veil of a heads-up display (HUD) quickly gives way to actual experience. You have a health meter and various bits of data like a supply count and upgradable abilities, sure, but the only part of The Last of Us that actually feels glaringly game-y is a “listen mode” that highlights where bad guys are. The game’s stellar stealth system abandons all of the vision cones and other visual markers that clutter so many other games centered on sleuthing. In their absence, there’s a small handful of ingredients—a dark room, a bottle or brick to throw, a shiv if you’re willing to spend that precious resource.

The lack of direction here makes the game’s movements so seamless they’re almost jarring—when I first played the game a few weeks ago in front of a Sony representative, for instance, I died so many times I ended up apologizing for wasting his time. But like Joel and Ellie themselves, I gradually learned how to survive in this bleak and beautiful world. I grew to understand the heft and imprecision of Joel’s movements, the speed at which I could approach “clickers” (zombies who’ve sprouted so much cauliflower out of their heads that they can only hunt down prey by way of echolocation) so they wouldn’t notice me. Every time one of them swung around suddenly as if to sniff me out, the seconds until they returned to mindless shambling were impossibly tense and invigorating.

Combat is similarly frenetic and, somehow, incredibly basic. Zombies hurl themselves at you in the way that zombies are wont to do, leaving you with precious few moments to thin their ranks or make a run for it. The game’s human enemies, meanwhile, move with the oppressive proficiency of a pack of wolves—flanking and surprising you at every turn until you learn that running into an encounter guns blazing is never a smart way to do things. “Make every shot count,” Joel tells Ellie at one point when teaching her the basics of survival. The Last of Us keeps its own gadgets in check to force players to do the same.

This economy of gameplay is what keeps The Last of Us fresh throughout its entire lengthy single-player storyline. Joel and Ellie become more adept at survival, but they never stop being fragile. While a zombie game like Dead Island has a great few hours at its beginning, it devolves into artless repetition once it sacrifices this notion of scarcity. No matter how many times you kill a zombie or raider in The Last of Us (and you kill a lot of both), each new encounter still pulsates with urgency. “Let’s see where this goes,” Joel says once again after he and Ellie survive a particularly nasty battle with some undaunted survivalists and they return to searching for a way out of a claustrophobic city. For once, I had no idea what to expect.

Much of this ingenuity has to do with the game’s sheer technical prowess. Like Naughty Dog’s acclaimed series of “Indiana Jones”-like Uncharted games, The Last of Us squeezes every last drop of power out of the PlayStation 3 to bring its world and characters to life. As the game industry prepares its transition to a new generation of consoles, many developers have started talking up the ability of technological innovation to describe new emotions in their software. That may be true, but Naughty Dog is one of the rare studios that manages to turn it into an artist’s brush. Simply put, Joel and Ellie look and act more realistically than anything I can remember seeing in a video game. Yet they’re also fascinating and flawed characters, not just functional avatars built to serve the glib purpose of “fun.”

Thing is, once you cross the uncanny valley, there’s no going back. The Last of Us is still a game, after all, which can lead to some unsettling tensions. The combat is incredibly, almost unbearably, violent. At times, fun starts to seem like a distant concern to Naughty Dog’s developers. Joel’s flaws make him a compelling person to live some small glimpse of science fiction through, but they can also turn him into a frustrating player character. His aim is never as steady as you want it to be. And while The Last of Us is a world without grace, you might find yourself longing for the acrobatic ease of a game like Remember Me’s combat. “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it,” McCarthy says early in “The Road.” It’s a fair point, but there’s a reason he chose to write a novel instead of try to make something that, by many people’s definition, is supposed to be an entertaining bit of casual escapism.

But that’s not the point. Naughty Dog knows that we’ve already played games like “Remember Me.” As much as some people love Uncharted, we’ve even experienced that many times over at this point.

What we haven’t played yet is a game like The Last of Us. So if for nothing else than to try something unique, go pick up this gorgeous swan song to the current console generation. See where the future of gaming hardware and software might take us. Watch one of the most touching and vulnerable relationships ever created by a video game evolve alongside something as formulaic as your zombie-killing skills. But, most importantly, just see where it goes. You won’t be disappointed.